


Rendezvous

by quiversarrow



Category: BTOB, K-pop
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2021-01-18 15:51:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21279299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiversarrow/pseuds/quiversarrow
Summary: No one knows the real story of Lyla Haliday's death except for Im Hyunsik, the astronaut who loved her. He's remained silent about it for the year and a half after Lyla's death, but one day he approaches a young journalist and gives her permission to tell his story.
Kudos: 2





	Rendezvous

**Author's Note:**

> Based off of the events in the MV for "Dear Love." 
> 
> DISCLAIMER: I've edited Bae Yujin's appearance in the video into an entirely different character due to her age (the actress/model is only 17) & the nature of her character's relationship with Hyunsik in the story. Lyla is NOT Yujin.

The only reference to Lyla Haliday from the 7th West Global Station was a single log in green type:  _ Pilot 156 Lyla Haliday, D798 14082147, DECEASED.  _

It was a gross understatement of what may have been the most remarkable event to ever befall the station, and possibly space exploration for decades. 

If you were to ask anyone in any branch of the 7WGS what happened on October 14, 2147, they would all describe more than a woman’s death. Some would tell it as the love story of the ages: star-crossed lovers whose path ended in tragedy. Others would tell it as the story of a lone hero, a man destined to protect the woman he loved. Others still would tell it as the coming of age of a woman who finally got to choose something for herself, even if that choice was death. 

And there were still others who would just fill in the gaps. Yes, Lyla Haliday was dead, but she died in an explosion caused when the bridge between her spacecraft and another collapsed. Lyla Haliday was dead, but she was dead because of completely normal circumstances and not the destruction of a planet and a desperate game with time. 

You would think that there would be a more concrete story for the whole thing, considering that Im Hyunsik, the lonesome hero involved, was still alive, but Hyunsik remained stubbornly silent on the subject. The only thing any of his friends at the station could get out of him was a cryptic smile or a simple, “I miss her.”

“No, you idiot,” his friends would say. “But was she really from another world?” 

Hyunsik would never respond. But here he was, with me, sitting cross-legged on my couch wearing a neat grey suit and a serene smile. He didn’t look like a man who had almost died in space. He certainly didn’t look like a man who had almost died in space while watching the woman he loved actually die in space. 

I probably should have sweet-talked him, as was the journalist’s way. I could have smiled and offered him a glass of red wine, asked about the songs he was writing, congratulated him on the spectacular shots that had come out of his mission...but I didn’t. I was sitting across from a man who had spent a little less than a year in space while I wrote articles in my bedroom. I didn’t feel qualified to play games with him. 

So I just got straight to the point: “Do you mind if I record? We’ll send you a copy to make sure we have your consent to publish.” 

“That’s fine,” he said. His speaking voice was almost exactly the same as his singing one: lilting, low, a little melancholy. I wondered suddenly if Lyla Haliday had ever heard it. She would never hear “Dear Love,” Hyunsik’s heart-wrenching ballad, or be able to weigh in on whether it was really about her, as most of Hyunsik’s fans thought it was. 

“For the world at large, you’re a musician,” I started, shaking myself out of my own thoughts. Hyunsik’s calm gaze was intense in its constancy. “You have several albums out now and songs still topping the charts. But not a lot of people know that you studied to become an astronaut in your early years. Can you tell us a little more about how you received the mission that brought you here?”

His response was measured, perfect, like he was reading out of a textbook. “It was two years ago. Since enrolling in a space mission is now a way to satisfy the enlistment requirement, I decided to tap into my early college studies. Surprisingly, I got into a program. There was a year of fitness training to make sure I’d be able to physically handle it, and then they assigned me to a photo exploration of a new planet, Skiro.” 

“This new planet—is it the same one that was said to have just disappeared?”

A shadow passed over Hyunsik’s face, somehow making his eyes even sadder. His tone, however, remained the same. “Yes.”

The hour that I’d booked for our interview passed in much the same way as that first question: I asked my perfectly constructed questions from the night before and he responded as if he knew the answers all along. I’d never done an interview quite like it. Never once did I catch him off guard. Even in the single moment when his emotions bubbled up, he was composed. Calm, but so sad. 

I gave him a little bow when we were done, which was customary, but I think I put a little more into it than I usually did. The whole experience had been rather unnerving, but I was also, inexplicably, deeply moved. 

And so I bowed almost 90 degrees to Im Hyunsik as he left my home, and in return, he abruptly turned to me and pulled two battered notebooks out of his bag. He handed them to me as if they were the most valuable thing in the world, and I held them as such. 

“What are they?” I asked. I gently peeled back the front cover of the one on top, and looked at the slanted handwriting there.  _ Log #1. Pilot 156 Lyla Haliday. _

I turned widened eyes to Hyunsik, who smiled at the pages in my hands. 

“I don’t do the story justice,” he said. “I trust that you will.” 

Before I could say anything else, he gave me a bow of his own before slipping out the door. I stared after him even as the door shut in my face. The books in my hands were the only proof that the whole experience hadn’t just been a figment of my imagination.

* * *

I listened back to my recorded interview several times before I parsed through either of the notebooks. I didn’t know how to process the fact that Hyunsik had given me full access to his personal log of his time in space, and especially didn’t understand how he had access to Lyla’s, much less that he had given it to me. 

Part of me was convinced they weren’t real. Part of me didn’t want them to be. The burden of owning an astronaut’s intimate story—and the answer to a mystery nearly a year and a half old—was almost enough to suffocate me. I was 23, just out of university with a journalism degree that I wasn’t sure I’d really earned, and I held what might be the universe’s most valuable story to date. 

I wanted to call my manager and tell her to take on the story instead. But then again, I really didn’t. Hyunsik had given me—and only me—permission to tell his story. When would I have this chance again?

And so, after my fifth relisten to our interview, I took out my earbuds and curled up on my bed with his 2146-2147 Skiro logbook. Pages upon pages of perfect lines sprawled out before me. It was hard to believe that a human had written them.

The first ten logs were as dry as any mission logs I’d ever imagined. Hyunsik described the planets he saw, including our own Earth, as objective masses made of percentages of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide that he could calculate with knobs and levers on his spacecraft’s control system. Half of the language flew directly over my head. The other half flowed as easily into my brain as it did out of it, seconds later. 

I was half asleep when Lyla finally appeared, although the mention of her wasn’t what jolted me out of my stupor. It was the sudden succinctness of the log; Hyunsik tended to write in long chunks with incredibly meandering descriptions of comet tails and dust specks. Yet, when Lyla appeared, he seemed to take a breath. 

_ Log #34. Pilot 828 Im Hyunsik. _

_ These logs are supposed to be for recording the discovery of foreign objects. And yet, today I found something familiar. The Lady made contact with a real lady today, in another spacecraft. I plan to ask her name.  _

The rest of the page was blank, nearly three-quarters of it. The next log contained three pages of description of a swathe of striking green on a moon that the Lady had passed, and then a postscript where Hyunsik’s robotic handwriting wavered slightly, slanted in excitement or maybe haste. 

_ Her name is Lyla Haliday. She doesn’t write in Korean. Her letters are round and curled like a little kid’s. The dots over her i’s are hollow circles. I tried to ask her where she’s from, but she didn’t seem to understand. I don’t think she could see very well. I will ask her again tomorrow, in bigger letters.  _

My curiosity began to overtake me, and so I closed Hyunsik’s logbook and reached over to my desk to grab Lyla’s. It was significantly chunkier, and as I began to flip through it, I realized why. Lyla had been in space far longer than Hyunsik. Her descriptions were shorter than his and she wrote in bullet points, but because she writing for nearly a year before her ship met the Lady, I was halfway through her logbook when I finally found the entry I was looking for. 

_ Log #326. Pilot 156 Lyla Haliday.  _

_ \--other spacecraft confirmed: male pilot, Asian _

_ \--potentially lost????? _

_ EDIT: not lost! Korean, named Im Hyunsik (Hyungsik? Hyunshik?) _

_ \--cute smile _

_ \--waves slowly _

_ \--will use for more information on current location _

_ Log #327. Pilot 156 Lyla Haliday. _

_ \--Im Hyunsik (name spelling 95.4% confirmed)  _

_ \--location: 50659RA 32312dec to Skiro (SK728) AKA too far from home _

_ \--carbon levels low  _

_ \--nitrogen 64%  _

_ PS. pilot might show me how to dance tomorrow. Bonus points: has a fancy guitar and might be famous (????) on his planet _

_ PSS. we have discovered that we are not from the same planet. Or at least of the same time. Interesting fact that I will record as it develops further.  _

I sat back. I already knew that Lyla was not from our Earth from Hyunsik’s interview, but to see it in her own words was its own kind of shock. I flipped back to Hyunsik’s logbook. Nearly ten pages of description and a few sketches that made no sense to me later, he mentioned it. 

_ I’ve finally figured out where Lyla is from, for certain, certain enough that I’m willing to write it down. I found it impossible to believe that she would know how to speak and write English if she wasn’t from Earth. I was right. She is from Earth, but Earth 21 years ago. She’s 23.  _

I sucked in a breath. Lyla Haliday was my age when she died. I shooed the thought from my mind before I could dwell on it. Journalism, I reminded myself. Distance. 

Hyunsik’s log devolved into a list of numbers and elements, and then broke back into prose. His letters were oblong, not quite perfect, as if his hand had been shaking. 

_ I always thought it was strange that Skiro’s numbers so effortlessly aligned with Earth’s. Why would a new planet utterly devoid of life have all of Earth’s signatures: the exact same percentages of every element? Then I understood: Skiro is Earth, but from 2125.  _

_ But Lyla isn’t from Skiro. Skiro isn’t a physical planet at all. It’s a memory. One of the first acts I logged was the 828 probe, which passed through the planet like it was air. Or at least I assumed it was air. It wasn’t. The probe ceased to connect to my system not because it was eviscerated as it passed through the planet, but because it passed into 2125, and was destroyed before it was even created.  _

_ Before this I’ve done my best to write my interactions with Lyla out of this narrative, because I thought she wasn’t part of my mission. But she IS my mission. A version of Earth was destroyed in 2125 and someone saved Lyla by putting her in a ship and shooting her into space.  _

Hyunsik’s analysis was smooth and bulletproof. He listed out all of the facts and placed them out before me in perfect clarity, until I couldn’t NOT see that Lyla was a girl from a dead planet displaced in time. Of course she was. Of course the rumors were true. There was no other explanation. 

But when I read Lyla’s discovery, I recognized the chaos of a 23-year-old girl who didn’t know herself. I felt her visceral refusal of it. I recognized myself in the long string of no’s that she spat out, one by one, increasing in size. I saw myself even more in the rationality that came out of it afterwards, the sober, small-lettered list of events that she wrote out just to see them, to try to disprove them even though she already knew there was nothing to disprove. 

Her parents had given her letters to read when she turned 15.

She had never tried a hot dog.

She had never tried Korean food. 

She didn’t remember what real food tasted like. 

She didn’t think she had ever had real food. 

She didn’t know any songs off of the top of her head; she’d never bothered to memorize any of them. 

She was never given a mission, and only imagined up interesting ones for herself. 

Home was the one coordinate her ship wouldn’t take her. 

_ I spent my childhood alone,  _ she wrote in little letters, and then even smaller.  _ I have been here since I was 2 years old.  _

_ What is my mission? To stay alive.  _

The words jolted me back to my interview—the interview I’d spent 5 hours listening to through my earphones. 

“What was the turning point for you?” I asked Hyunsik as he sat there like a king on my couch. “When did you realize that you were willing to take the risk to meet her?”

Emotion, for the first time, swelled up in his eyes. It wasn’t just the constant sadness that seemed to radiate off of him; this time, he looked like he might cry. Then he reeled himself in and smiled. 

“I had to,” he said. “My mission was to see Skiro, and after discovering that Lyla and it were part of the same phenomenon, she became part of my mission. And part of that mission was to fulfill her mission.”

“Which was what?”

“The same as anyone’s. To live.” 

* * *

The more that I read, the more both books ceased to be logbooks. Or at least, the logbook parts of them mattered less to me. At first, the journalist’s side of me had paid at least enough attention to the wordier parts of the record for context, but eventually I stopped caring about them as much, and eventually at all. 

My story was about Hyunsik and Lyla. Maybe as a love story, partly, but mostly as a phenomenon. As a thing that, I was realizing, shouldn’t have been able to happen, but did anyway. 

For one, Lyla’s parents had written her letters. She transcribed parts of them in her logs, but she must have kept the full transcripts to herself. I didn’t blame her; some things were better kept to oneself. But she must have read all of their contents to Hyunsik because he mentioned them several times, all in the context of Earth’s destruction in the spring of 2125. 

_ Hyunsik insists that my parents put me in this ship for a reason, _ Lyla wrote at the end of one of her logs.  _ He thinks the heavy forecast they talked about was a euphemism for some sort of catastrophic climate collapse. They had to have predicted it beforehand, or else how would I have survived, and why would they have sent me as a baby? _

Whenever she wrote about Hyunsik, she stopped bullet-pointing, at least to start. She had stolen some fancy words from him, or at least found their equivalent in English. Hyunsik, meanwhile, seemed to run out of words when he wrote about her. His postscripts became almost like to-do lists. I read the bottom of Log #65 several times before I even understood what it was. 

_ cherry blossoms _

_ a concert _

_ Han river _

_ groceries from the market _

_ crowded restaurants _

_ snow _

I thought they were things that Hyunsik missed about Earth, things he wanted to do when he got home. They weren’t. 

_ He asked me if I’d seen snow _ , wrote Lyla. _ I told him of course I have, but only in books and in the small video library on my ship. I didn’t see it as a bad thing, but I saw the sadness in his eyes. He says I’ve missed a lot. I never felt that way though because I always thought I’d get to go home.  _

_ He said come home with me and I’ll show you all of it. _

They were promises. Hyunsik wrote about promises as mundane as seeing snow and walking beside the Han River in the same way that he wrote about his promise to meet Lyla. His postscript several pages later was a note to himself about it, simple, like he was promising to go out with his friend for lunch. 

_ She wants to go _ , he wrote. The page was well-worn with a crumpled section near where his thumb would have been.  _ Connect Lady & Ship. _ Black check.  _ Reinforce tunnel for time loop. _ Black check.  _ Align time. _ Black check.  _ Rendezvous. _ Nothing. 

And yes, there was the time loop. I would never have understood it if it wasn’t for a bewildered little paragraph of Lyla’s that didn’t even connect to a particular log. It just floated on its own page, the words falling a little off of their lines as if she had scribbled them half-asleep. 

_ How the hell am I even alive? Hyunsik’s radio and comms can’t reach my frequency because I’m living—and dying—21 years before him. Shit. I wave and he waves his damn slow wave back, except it’s me waving first and then him seeing that and responding 21 years later. How is the planet living and dying 21 years ago? How the shit does that happen. Fuck. How am I even alive.  _

Hyunsik didn’t respond, of course, but he peppered his descriptions of Skiro’s swirling blue-black surface with descriptions of the blow-up tunnel in the back of his pilot cabin as he checked it for impurities. He planned to use an extra suit to patch up some of the problems, and while he did so, he also used his ship’s scanners—with 21 years on Lyla’s defunct ones—to search her approaching ship for impurities too. 

It was on the thirteenth scan that he caught it. 

_ I just thought they were blips in the record, just Lyla’s ship flitting out of view. But she’s not just flitting out of view; she’s flitting out of existence entirely. Dying, or just about, before being revitalized in an instant. It’s illegal tech now, of course. No one would even dare to try to build a time loop now. People know the consequences. _

_ But in 2125 they didn’t.  _

_ No one had even tried it yet. The first trial was in 2130. Someone out there could have had a prototype. Someone out there could have been Lyla’s parents. And if Lyla’s Ship is at the center of the time loop, she might be the sole reason why her planet isn’t permanently dead.  _

Several pages of pure analysis followed, no postscripts. Even Lyla’s bullet points remained surprisingly on task, even if the only task she had ever been assigned as a two-year-old was to survive. She joined Hyunsik in describing Skiro and even devoted herself to calculating the distances between each of its moons (which it had ostensibly gained while flickering in and out of existence). 

Then came the part where both logbooks ceased to be logbooks altogether. I was suddenly reading a collage. Calculations with strings of numbers long enough that my eyes crossed spanned pages; the numbers curled down the sides of the pages and clumped together over the lines. Some things were circled, some crossed out. Lyla color-coded hers. Hyunsik made columns. 

Some pages were just larger rewrites of the haphazard pages before them; I could picture Lyla and Hyunsik holding out their logbooks to the glass, pointing, mouthing in English.  _ Is this right? Does this work? _

Hyunsik eventually started sketching pictures of the tunnel, while Lyla drew responses. All of the drawings focused on where the two tunnels would connect and how to seal them together. A list of chemicals and random items that both ships had on board ran down the sides of the pages. A few of Lyla’s pages had stains from spills; one page had the whole bottom section torn neatly off. 

By Log #125 on Hyunsik’s side, the calculations were finished. The tunnel was prepared. And in their idle time, Lyla and Hyunsik turned from mathematicians to poets. Hyunsik wrote at least ten songs (or at least very pretty, rhyming poems) for her, columned off in the same way that his math problems were. In Lyla’s book, she mentioned that he wrote songs in his free time, and sometimes she’d see him playing his guitar through the glass. 

She definitely wasn’t aware that about nine out of ten of the songs were about her, and at least six of them involved a bed. I found myself covering the pages with cupped hands, even though I was in my bedroom alone and no one was watching. 

Lyla’s prose, on the other hand, made up little paragraphs of hope. They weren’t pretty or intimate in the same way Hyunsik’s songs were, but I almost liked them more. They were real, yearning. They expected. I couldn’t bring myself to read them and think about the dead girl who penned them, so I imagined her still in space sleeping, dreaming. 

_ Hyunsik writes music. I asked him what music is like, since all I have in my back drawer is a manila folder of antique disco CDs. He says it’s like listening to a heartbeat. It reminds him he’s alive. I told him that’s stupid, because music can’t do that. Talking to another person can. I learned that by talking to him. He says he’ll show me what he means when we meet.  _

Several logs later, Hyunsik told her he was really going to teach her how to dance. They had at least a hundred days before their ships would be able to rendezvous at the perfect moment, when both of them were alive together. 

_ She thought I was going to teach her how to dance to disco, which wouldn’t have been bad,  _ Hyunsik admitted, _ except that I wanted to slow dance.  _

Meanwhile, Lyla ranted,  _ he didn’t teach me how to dance to the disco! He played a ballad instead and had me spin in circles, and then afterwards he told me that the song he was dancing to on his side was his own song. The bastard! I couldn’t even hear it.  _

I had imagined a laugh for Lyla by then—a tinkling little bird’s laugh—and I played it back to myself as I read. It appeared less and less the closer I got to the rendezvous date; by the time Hyunsik’s logs were in their 300s, Lyla had become pensive and very subtly afraid. Her logs were mostly analyses that didn’t mean anything, followed by a few lines that reminded me how young she was. 

_ Will I know how to live when I get the chance? _ she asked.  _ Bodies become used to the lack of density in space. What if my bones shatter on impact? What if I don’t know how to walk?  _

_ Hyunsik tells me he’ll hold my hand, but what if he doesn’t want anything to do with me when we land? I’m the only girl he’s ever met in space. Once he goes back, what if he forgets me? _

I could have answered that for her at this point. No, Hyunsik would not forget her. No, he didn’t think of her as the only girl he’d met in space. He thought of her as the woman who made too-sharp canines cute. She was the woman who wanted nothing more than to see snow. She was the woman who didn’t want to slow dance because  _ wouldn’t doing a faster dance in zero gravity be amazing? _

_ She looks at life with so much light,  _ Hyunsik wrote in Log #331.  _ She’s been told that she and her family and her entire planet have been living and dying again and again for the last 21 years and yet she laughs at my jokes. What a privilege it is to know her.  _

* * *

In Hyunsik’s logbook, Log #332 was blank. 

In Lyla’s logbook, Log #798 filled up two lines. None of it was analysis or bullet points. 

_ We’ve hit the coordinates and the tunnel is ready. I’m about to go in. Tomorrow, I’ll walk on land with 23-year-old legs for the first time, or I’ll be dead. In case I don’t make it—Hyunsik,  _

The bottom section was ripped out. Another page from another book had been carefully taped in. 

_ I’m so excited to meet you _ , it read in Hyunsik’s neat, robotic handwriting. _ Don’t you dare spend a moment of this being sad for me. It was worth every second.  _

Log #799 was blank. 

Log #333 in Hyunsik’s book was in a different pen color.

_I’m not going to turn in this logbook, _he wrote. _Nor have I decided to hand over the one I took from Lyla’s Ship._ _I’m giving them to you instead. I’ve read all of your articles for 2Times Magazine, and I believe that you will make our story beautiful. It’s what Lyla deserves. I trust you won’t let us down. _

I read greedily, now that I knew he was addressing me. 

_ I know that when you interview me you’ll ask me what happened in those last moments.  _

I had. 

_ You’ll probably be disappointed with my answers. You’ll think I just didn’t want to tell you—that some things are better kept secrets.  _

I had just thought he was too traumatized to tell me the truth, or at least the whole of it. And I was good at turning half-lies into pretty half-truths. I’d never even considered that I would get the whole truth from him.

But there was no prettiness here. It was the whole truth—clipped, raw, bruised. 

_ She walked into the tunnel. I was on the other side. We walked towards each other, and then one of the patches that I had crafted stretched a little too far. The crack it revealed was all it took. There was a great sucking sound and then an explosion of silvery pieces of tunnel and white suit and Lyla floating out into space with a tear in her suit.  _

_ Except it wasn’t just space. Our plan banked on Lyla passing out of the time loop into a time and space right outside of it, where the Lady waited. With the tunnel broken, she passed straight out of her ship—and out of the time loop—into space. The tear in her suit was all it took.  _

_ When she died, I saw the time loop end, flowing right out of her ship. If you’ve never seen a time loop’s energy, it’s like a prism: all parts of time reflected on itself. Rainbow light surrounded Lyla and her suit and then flowed downwards toward her planet. The light that burst out of it as it experienced 21 years of life and death all at once was enough to force me back into my ship. I closed the tunnel. I cut the Ship off. I didn’t look back, but I figure it exploded into the white light of 21 years, too.  _

* * *

It was in the wee hours of the morning that I finally pieced together my article. I then crawled into bed and dreamed of rainbow light. I walked behind it as it collected into the shape of an astronaut that began to weave through the asteroids and comets that surrounded us. I followed in a daze, compelled. 

Across from us, a spacecraft passed into view, landing amongst the comets. The astronaut that I followed took a few more steps forward and then paused. The spacecraft door opened, and out walked another astronaut, except this one wasn’t made up of swirling rainbow light. I gasped when I caught a glimpse of the face inside the glass.

_ Hyunsik!  _ I shouted, but no sound came out. 

The astronaut in front of me, who I was now absolutely certain was Lyla, held out her hand and waved, slowly. I could feel the warmth of Hyunsik’s smile through the glass and the leagues of time and space between us as he waved back. 

* * *

I jolted awake from a distinct buzzing and slammed my hand into my phone. Realizing what I’d done seconds afterwards, I hastily groped for it. Brought it to my face. Squinted. And then sat bolt upright, so hard I saw stars. 

_ Heejin. Sorry to hit you up with bad news, but your guy is gone. No need to hurry on the story; we’ll repurpose it. Sorry, kiddo.  _

_ My guy?  _ I fumbled for my glasses, my heart pounding, and googled  _ Im Hyunsik _ . 

“No,” I whispered, too stunned to say anything else. 

_ Singer and world-renowned astronaut Im Hyunsik found dead in his Seoul home. Cause of death unknown.  _

Tears sprung to my eyes. I hadn’t known him personally, but goddammit I had known him as well as anyone could. I knew that he hated asparagus even though he ate it every damn day in his spaceship called the Lady and goddammit, he couldn’t be dead. 

But he was. 

And he’d known all along. 

Why had he trusted me, of all people, with this? I ached with resentment; my chest felt as if it might sink into the floor. How could he make me read a whole two logbooks about him and Lyla Haliday and make me feel as if I had lost not one, but two close friends? 

I couldn’t deliver my story to the world after this. It would be too cruel.

But the world would be curious. And I was sure it would want to know what had dawned on me as I’d picked up my phone and squinted at the date before seeing the text from my manager. 

Today was January 12, 2149. Exactly 798 days after Hyunsik’s mission started. 

I wasn’t a scientist or an astronaut, but I once read that if two particles in space became quantum-entangled, they would become so tied together that they would mirror each other’s movements. If one moved up, the other would too. And if one perished, so would the other. 

A time loop wasn’t too far from quantum entanglement. Time entanglement. The two were barely a tunnel apart. 

I picked up Lyla’s logbook, and it automatically flipped open to the last page she’d written—the one that Hyunsik had doctored with a taped copy of her last words. 

_ I’m so excited to meet you. Don’t you dare spend a moment of this being sad for me. It was worth every second. _

I had thought that he was just telling me what Lyla had said, but that wasn’t all he was doing. He was smiling that serene smile of his and reminding me, his storyteller, what I had to do. What I owed him after a night of sitting in his ship, and hers. I took a deep breath and grabbed my laptop and coat. 

The world was going to see my story, and it was going to see it now. 


End file.
